Russia has started a campaign to destroy illegally imported Western food embargoed by Moscow in retaliation to Western sanctions. In Belgorod, 10 tons of various European cheeses were destroyed on August 6.

Scientists have created a gas with the lowest-ever level of entropy, which will help the study of elusive quantum effects and potentially create new high-temperature superconductors.Entropy measures how ordered or disordered a system is, with lower entropy corresponding to more order. A room-full of people all speaking at the same time would be disordered, the noise makes picking out individual voices harder.

In thermodynamics, cooling down a system would be equivalent to hushing the hum. At a certain point enough atoms in a cooling gas would reach the state of lowest energy possible to allow quantum effects to manifest at a macroscopic level. The gas exhibiting such properties is called Bose-Einstein condensate after physicists Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein, who predicted it. Measuring one nanoKelvin, or one billionth of a degree above absolute zero, the Bose-Einstein condensate created at the University of California, Berkeley has entropy about 100 times lower than in previous experiments and is the quietest gas ever made.

An Islamic State affiliate in Egypt has kidnapped a Croatian citizen working for a French company. In a video released online, the jihadists are threatening to kill him if Muslim women kept in Egyptian prisons are not released.

The hostage was identified as Tomislav Salopek, 30, from Croatia. He is employed by Ardiseis Egypt, a subdivision of CGG, a company specializing in oil and gas geology, and based in France.In the video titled ‘A message to the Egyptian government’, a masked man with a knife is seen standing near kneeling Salopek, who is dressed in an orange jumpsuit. The black flag of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/SIL) is clearly seen in the video.

Salopek is heard reading a note where he names himself, states his age, country and place of work. He says that he is married and has two children.The Croatian says he was captured on Wednesday, July 22, 2015. The jihadists have already voiced their demands – they want to "substitute" Salopek for the Muslim women kept in Egyptian prisons, says the hostage.

NASA has released spectacular footage of the “dark side” of the Moon – fully illuminated – as the Earth’s natural satellite was moving across the sunlit side of our planet. The unique shots were captured by the Deep Space Climate Observatory.

Taken by the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC), the images show a unique view of our planet and the moon from one million miles away. The capture of this rare spectacle was made possible due to the orbiting trajectory of the DSCOVR satellite that is positioned between the Sun and the Earth, giving it the capability to see the far side of the Moon.

“It is surprising how much brighter Earth is than the Moon,” said Adam Szabo, DSCOVR project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Our planet is a truly brilliant object in dark space compared to the lunar surface.”

The series of images taken on July 16 were compiled into GIF animation that depicts the Moon flying over the North America and the Pacific Ocean. The images taken from the satellite’s point of view also clearly show the tilt of the Earth, with the North Pole located in the upper left corner.